Well folks,

I've been debating on whether to post this or not since it doesn't seem to make much reliable sense to me, but for the sake of being openminded, I'll tell the story anyway.

A few months ago I was was having alot of trouble with the the hard-drives not getting detected. It would happen on and off until one week when it never seemed to come up at all. Something was getting worse - most likely the IDE cables that everyone talks about. So I took it apart to fix it.

I tried recrimping the cable - no luck
I swtched the drives - still no luck.
I switched the ends of the cable around - having it use the other side of the cable on the motherboard - no luck
At this point - it was never coming up - I was sure that I had hosed it royally - so I started trying stuff that had no rhyme or reason to it.

The last thing I tried was re-pluging the drives and rebooting about 6-7 times in a row and each time the empeg did not recognize the drives.

Then... (and here is the pre-kicker):
I plugged the ide cable (on the motherboard side) in backwards (meaning plug0 was not plugged into pin0) - and as expected, no drives detected.

Now for the kicker:
When replugged the ide cable (on the motherboard side) in correctly, it worked. I was amazed!

I checked the board for cold solder joints and they all looked OK - plugged it in again and it still worked!

I've been using it for months now (same as before) and not once have I had an IDE problem. The drives have been detected every boot - which is more than daily.

I'd like to hear what the more technical gurus have to say about this one - because it is certainly contrary to my intuition on how this stuff works. I suspect that it had something to do with turnng the empeg on with the IDE cable on bcakwards. Either that or it is just FM!

Any ideas?

Sounds like the connection on the motherboard wasn't tight enough. Probably had nothing to do with plugging it in backwards. The connection on the motherboard is probably the more likely culprit when drives aren't being detected. I know this becase I've dropped my Empeg hard twice now and each time the drives were fine (the shock absorbing really is amazing) but the ide cable was pulled enough off the motherboard that I had to open the Empeg up and reconnect it.

That is a good point - although it was really tight on the mother board and I remember that I had unplugged and replugged that plug lots of times that evening before everything worked.

I'd like to know if anyone else has a similar experience - anyone out there?

It could also be a dry solder joint on the motherboard IDE connector...

Edit: But you said you didn't see it. Sometimes the plug can work its way off the connector. It has happened in the past.